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My Granny found a load of old photos – including the one below, of my Grandad’s sister, my uncle and two aunties. It was small, quite damaged, somehow burnt and crumpled to shit. She wanted a bigger print and my mother volunteered me to do it, because of course she did! Maybe she knew I wouldn’t just print it as is and would try make some attempt to fix it. If so, she was right, it would annoy me otherwise. However, I know dick all about photo editing software (bar making CD artwork once, and the occasional Simpsons shit post). Anyway, she Whatsapp-ed me the above image and I had to wing it from there.

First thing I did, on my phone, was crop it. The sky was white so wasn’t losing anything important. I tried the Photoshop Express mobile app to see if I could get through this in a couple of minutes. The short answer was no. So I emailed it to myself and thought I’d try it on a PC.

The first software I tried to use Jasc PaintShop Pro but couldn’t find the clone brush and after a bit of googling found out apparently there wasn’t one (and since then I’ve found out apparently there is). Luckily, the guy behind me in work is quite handy with GIMP and was able to point me in the right direction.

I was making it up as I went along, but after a few hours of using GIMPs Clone Brush (apparently called Sample in Photoshop) I managed to get something decent. I got some prints ordered and my Granny seemed pleased. I stopped there as I knew I could lose many more hours trying to get it “perfect” but I was quite chuffed with my first attempt. After I tweeted an old school friend explained to me what the opacity was for. This will probably be useful as it’s inevitable the next time an old photograph is found it will come my way.